The Sunday Hangman

by James McClure

  “Let’s hear it,” Kramer said, winding down his window.

  “Two things, Lieutenant.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Number one, I have reason to believe,” replied Zondi, who was such a flagrant mimic most of his subjects never noticed, “that the body of the deceased was brought to this place after his demise.”

  “What?” said Strydom, leaning across. “Did someone see this?”

  “Not in as many words, Dr. Strydom, sir, but observations were indeed made. My witnesses stand over by the fence.”

  Two potbellied, small Zulu boys, possibly aged five and eight, dressed in a man’s ragged shirt and a woman’s torn summer shorts, respectively, peered at them from behind hands shyly raised.

  “Part of the raiding party here today,” Zondi explained, a smile flickering. “I thought it expedient to have them return with me, and to discuss exactly what they had seen upon arrival. They told me it is their custom to hide behind a tree while they ascertain whether the occupant of any parked vehicle—they had, of course, seen the deceased’s car from a distance—will take exception to their presence.”

  “Uh huh, so they hide behind tree A—it’s the farthest back,” said Kramer, trying to speed this up.

  “Correct, Lieutenant. Except when the sun comes out and the day grows hot, then they may wait by another one.”

  “Why?” asked Strydom.

  “The ants, Doctor, sir.”

  “Oh, ja.”

  “This has some bearing?” Kramer grumbled. “Come on, I can see you’re enjoying this, but get to the bloody point.”

  “May I speak without reservation, sir?”

  “You heard what I said, man!”

  “Then I must confess shamefully that the children of my people have very crude natures,” Zondi went on, and Strydom nodded. “Urination affords them many primitive delights. It gives them a true sense of power to see the creature upon which they have committed this act hop so swiftly away. Then there is the pleasure they take in seeing a man doing such a babyish thing as to wet down his trousers when he is drunk. For them to see a European—”

  “Zondi! You’re a bastard, aren’t you?” Kramer laughed, his memory of an investigation in which ants had provided vital evidence, along with a caterpillar, suddenly restored. “History repeats itself?”

  “Lieutenant?”

  But Zondi hadn’t recalled the case; his bewilderment was as great as that being shown by Doc Strydom, who was becoming very irritable, too.

  “Just get on with it,” Kramer sighed.

  “Well, sir, all that happened was that these children expressed some surprise to find the ants still in their home beneath the place where the deceased was hanging. Ngidi had told me of the unfortunate condition of the trousers in question, and I could see what they were saying was true. It is common knowledge that ants will take away their eggs if someone makes water on them. But those ants are all happy—as you may come and see.”

  They did just that, to suppressed giggling from the far side of the fence, and Strydom finished up on his hands and knees, grinning down the ant hole.

  “So who gets the Nobel this time?” he said over his shoulder to Kramer. “Yet those umfaans are quite right. These little chaps would have still been in there before eight, having their kip, and that’s why none of this occurred to Sergeant Arnot—he was here too early.”

  “It also clinches your theory, Doc.”

  “Too right, it does!”

  Kramer helped him back onto his feet, and checked to see what time it was: five on the dot, and getting pretty late, considering he and Zondi hadn’t stopped in more than twenty-four hours.

  “Now, what about the other thing you mentioned?” he asked, lighting a Lucky. “Let’s hear it, then get the hell out of here.”

  Zondi lost some of his confidence, and pointed to the taller child.

  “I am not so sure if this is important, Lieutenant, but that one picked up a bag near the stone this morning. He didn’t tell Ngidi because the question put to him was had he taken from the deceased’s car or person?”

  Familiar with how literal the illiterate poor could be in their interpretations, Kramer found nothing remarkable in this, but he did wonder why Zondi was being so half-hearted. And he said so.

  “It is a worthless cloth bag, sir. The only thing special is that it was not here yesterday, although I could not see a connection between—”

  “Not perhaps a bank’s bag?”

  “Oh, no, Lieutenant—proper trash, and not strong enough to carry money, even notes. I will get it for you, as I left it in his possession.”

  The bag that Zondi brought back to them was black and made of a cheap cotton fabric, hand-stitched clumsily up the sides. There was no drawstring, nor any indication of what it might have been used for. Kramer looked down into it and saw, as Zondi must have done, that there wasn’t even a little fluff at the bottom. Then, noticing the material was slightly stiffer at one point, he turned the thing inside out. The saliva stain wasn’t all that became visible then—so did several blond hairs, fairly obviously from the head of Tollie Erasmus.

  “God almighty,” gasped Strydom. “It’s a hood! A proper executioner’s hood!”

  “Boss?” said Zondi, startled into forgetting himself.

  Very briefly, Kramer filled him in on the post-mortem results, and then, because this recital revived the initial impact of their bizarre discovery, stood in a brown study, his gaze fixed farther along the fence. When he focused again, he found himself looking at the desiccated forms of two finches, pinned onto the barbed wire by a shrike.

  “If this bloke knows all about drops,” he said quietly, “and wanted to fake a suicide, then he’d have easily found another tree with a platform the right height beneath it. But he didn’t. He didn’t even bother to find out where the hood had got to. Just stuck his kill up there for all the world to see, as if he couldn’t give a bugger.”

  “Gives me the bloody creeps, Tromp. I get visions of a first-class scaffold, with provisions for half-inch adjustments and all the rest of it. Pit, steps going down. Hell.”

  This was too much for Kramer, and he snapped out of his reverie. “Ach, steady on, Doc! If you ask me, some bastards tried to screw the cash out of Tollie with a little homemade third degree, and it all went wrong. Must have been at least two of them involved, so that one could drive his Ford here.”

  “I disagree,” Strydom said huffily.

  “Well, something like that. Can’t guess any better until we know where he’s been the last three months. Probably got up the nose of a Jo’burg mob.”

  “I’m objecting to you treating this fracture as a fluke, Lieutenant. Hell, the flukes themselves are rare enough, without hoods and metal rings and God knows what else. Do you want me to prove that to you?”

  The Colonel was scrutinizing his ceiling, where he had a favorite lizard that caught flies for him. But the hour was late and it had probably left the office.

  “Just give me an outline to be going on with,” he told Kramer, “as you’re too bloody shagged out to talk any proper sense this evening. So let’s stop psychoanalyzing Doc’s little obsession and concentrate on what action you’re taking.”

  “Firstly, sir, I don’t want this getting to the press before we understand it better. You can see the effect it’s had on a supposedly mature—”

  “Consider that done.”

  “Ta. I’ve already handed the firearms over to Ballistics, and they’re sending specifications to every gun squad from here to Cape Town. Not much of a lead, I admit.”

  “Worth trying.”

  “The usual forensic checks are going ahead on Erasmus’s clothing, vehicle, and so on. Also the hood we found.”

  “Good.”

  “We were too late to dust the car for fingerprints—Arnot’s mob had already been through it. I get the Bible back in the morning—nothing on it so far, except Erasmus’s own—and we’ll see where that takes us.”

  “
You never can tell.”

  “Lead kindly light, sir?”

  “Trompie,” admonished the Colonel, a full elder of the Dutch Reformed Church, who wore a black frock coat and white bow tie on Sundays, “you mustn’t think being shagged out is any excuse for that kind of behavior! Now push off home, you hear?”

  “One other thing: I’ve put out a description of Erasmus as a reminder to those in the big cities who didn’t think this was a matter which concerned them. I bet you he was in Jo’burg the whole time, getting himself a nice tan at Zoo Lake, right under their bloody noses.”

  “Tomorrow, man. When you can also get all excited about what this same playboy was doing twenty kilometers south of Doringboom.”

  The man had a point there.

  Kramer rose from the corner of the desk and started to leave.

  “Oh, by the way, Tromp.…”

  “Colonel?”

  “I believe you and the DS had a little chat together this afternoon.”

  “Did we, sir?” Kramer said, suddenly having had a stomachful of devious old bastards.

  “I fully realize it was confidential,” Colonel Muller added hastily, as though the last thing he’d think of would be to pry, “but I just wondered.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “Well, how it had gone down.”

  “Like a glass of cold puke, sir.”

  It didn’t seem possible that a final touch had still to be put to that day, but Kramer, who’d seen two sunsets and no sleep, should have known better.

  He should also have been paying more attention to Zondi’s droll account of the afternoon’s adventures, because just after taking the turnoff to Kwela Village, he was aware of having missed a bit somewhere.

  “Go back to not knowing how to catch them,” he said, flicking away a half-smoked cigarette.

  “That was easy, boss. You remember what I said about the excited state of these kids? All I had to do was to lie very still. Soon they came crawling to see what the matter is this time, and they come right up close to hear if I am breathing. Pah! Two hands, two kids! The rest run like—”

  “You mean little sod. Thought you were too damn perky for a ten-kilometer round trip.”

  “They are happy, boss. By the way, twenty cents on expenses?”

  “Fine.”

  “You know that bacon?”

  “Don’t tell me: Ngidi scoffed it.”

  “No, the sergeant”—Zondi laughed—“while Ngidi was chasing the kids.”

  This made a good note to end on. Kramer just added that he didn’t want Zondi under his feet until at least the following afternoon, and then they drove in silence toward the smoky spread of the municipal township. Almost in the center of the serried rows of two-room dwellings, all as neatly placed as a thousand bureaucratic rubbers, the Chev stopped at one distinguished by a pathway edged in rusty cans. Zondi waved his thanks, and the Chev, which knew what to do, rumbled off down the corrugated dirt road and found the quickest way to Blue Haze.

  Kramer had bought the old farmhouse, with its meter-thick shale walls and wraparound verandah, to put in his will. Pending the implementation of this will, he rented the property, at the cost of a Trekkersburg apartment, to the ultimate beneficiary, the Widow Fourie, and her family of young children. It was really a very uncomplicated arrangement, which allowed him to pursue his chosen career without any thought of irresponsibility, and to be able to sleep the odd night in the country when the mood took him. As it had, against his better judgment, done now.

  But the children’s lights were out by the time the Chev finally nosed into the driveway and came crunching to a stop outside the front door. And the Widow Fourie, whose ample mind and body had drawn Kramer there, came out alone to greet him, tying back her yellow hair.

  “You caught me just going to wash it,” she scolded, her kiss pleased and quick. “So what’s been happening in the world I haven’t heard about?”

  “Ach, would you believe a state execution?”

  “Big deal,” said the Widow Fourie. “It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”

  6

  THERE ARE DREAMS that can affect the whole of a man’s working day. In the case of a very sweet dream, or of a positively terrible one, its influence can extend over a period far greater than that. Such a dream is, generally speaking, best not dreamed at all.

  This had always been Kramer’s belief, and it was why he was trying to get back to sleep again, the sooner to expunge all traces of the girl with long legs. Then again, to dream of one female, and to wake up in the bed of another, could leave a bloke feeling guilty for no good reason at all. But he remained dozing, remembering her now only in patches of sharp, scented detail: the neat knob of a wristbone, sweat pearled in the cup above her breastbone, the muss of honey wisps, a nipple swelling from pink raisin to grape, and the pinch of those long legs, straddling him, turning him over and over, and her laughter. So simple, so uncomplicated, so greedy it shocked him, made him greedy as well. Her crazy joy in him.

  “Hey,” said the Widow Fourie, whose warm back smoothed his belly, “what’s the point, when Joanna will be in with the tea soon?”

  He rolled away and looked down at the polished floorboards, noticing where the original owner’s great stinkwood bed had left the impression of a caster; what a hell of a nightly battering it must have withstood to do that. Then this gratuitous lewdness disgusted him, and he went to take a bath.

  The Widow Fourie wandered in a few minutes later, carrying the tea tray, and bringing her cigarettes with her. Like Strydom, she often complained about getting in five minutes of proper conversation, and this had long been her little trick. She knew, of course, that the door would never be bolted.

  “How are you this morning?” she asked, settling on the lavatory lid, which she’d prettified with blue lace. “You may not know this, but you were in a hell of a state all night. Worse than when the girls both had flu and I had them in with me.”

  Kramer, who liked to soak with only his nose, and as little else as possible, above water, shrugged a ripple down the bath.

  “I’ve also been thinking about this hangman, though,” she continued, clattering the cups, “and this I do know: he must be connected in some way with the prisons department. It’s the only way of gaining the required knowledge—you can’t tell me that the convicts really pick up anything but rumors. I remember reading once that a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of S.A. had to pretend he was a barber—actually his dad had been one—just to hear the inside story of Pretoria Central. You know how fussy they are about strangers in the jails? This prof or whatever used to cut the warders’ hair across the road and ask them questions, just casually sort of. Are you taking this in?”

  He raised his chin to say: “Fine, you’ve narrowed it down to an insider—but how many warders do you think there are in this country? We’ve over two hundred and fifty jails, a hundred thousand locked up in them—”

  “Ach, you know perfectly well what I mean! The expert knowledge has to come from somewhere, and at least we know roughly where that is. Your tea’s poured.”

  Although voices carried well, he needed cues like this, especially when a tap was running.

  “Ta, my girl. I can see the Doc’s nonsense has really caught your imagination.”

  “Don’t try to bluff me you aren’t wondering a bit!”

  “To tell you the truth,” said Kramer, taking his cup. “I’m putting the who and why of this right out of my mind until we get a lead on Erasmus’s last whereabouts. Switch that off, please.”

  She obliged, frowning slightly as if dissatisfied with his reply, but not actually querying it.

  “Then you’ve got something else on your mind, Trompie, or you’d have tried out the new frigate Janie’s made. He says it’s to shoot General Amin with, for what he does to people, but I told him Uganda hasn’t got any sea and besides—”

  Kramer had submerged briefly, making quite a splash. He stepped out and took up his towel.
/>   “Ja, ja, so maybe I have.”

  “Oh, that!” The Widow laughed, putting down her teacup. “That’s the whole trouble with having servants.”

  “No, I—”

  “Come on, why don’t we, though?” she said with sudden mischief. “Jo’s back in the kitchen and the kids aren’t up.”

  She rose and slipped home the bolt slowly and suggestively, making a funny, erotic thing of it, watching his eyes. Then she began loosening the gown which covered her voluptuous maturity, her wealth of warmth and tenderness so enveloping. How detached the girl had been, how detached, he remembered; how free she had left him.

  The Widow Fourie let go of the bow she had been undoing in her belt. “Is it Zondi again?” she asked solemnly. “There is definitely something; I can sense it.”

  Kramer began drying his hair.

  “Now listen to me, Trompie. I’ve had an idea recently. If the worst comes to the worst, and his leg doesn’t get any better, then why not start using some of the land round the back?

  Mickey could find—well—things to plant in it for us, turn it into a market garden. I know he grew up on a farm, so he’s bound to be able to—you know.”

  “All he knows of farming is what it did to his dad.”

  “He could learn, though. You’re the one who’s always said how intelligent he is.”

  “Mickey’s leg is mending nicely; you’ll see.”

  “He should have gone on giving it rest after—”

  “For him to decide.”

  “Oh, no,” said the Widow Fourie, very firmly. “Chris Strydom says that you’re the one who lets his hopes rise. Without you, he’d be treated like any other boy in the same situation, and it isn’t right—”

  “Behind my back, hey?”

  “I just happened to see Chris in the street.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Tromp, you’ve got to realize this is for your sake as well! I wouldn’t, normally. You know how I—”